They've lost the narrative bad here. Any technical merit it might have has been blasted by the poor messaging and uninspiring initial experiences.
My work gave me a Win11 machine. It works well enough (for a 16Gb machine trying to juggle Docker and JetBrains software) but I find it frustrating in trivial regressions:
* I didn't ask for rounded corners, and it tends to make software look weird if it doesn't expect to have the bottom right corner chopped off. Evidently there is no trivial way to disable this-- I looked and saw guides like "you basically have to disable hardware-accelerated graphics to force it into a compatibility mode" which seems rather using a chainsaw to cut butter. This just seems to be another stop on the "the user shouldn't be theming their machine at all" journey. (I set up a clean Win10 install this week and was surprised to see now it seemed to default to a randomized Bing wallpaper instead of the Windows logo)
noticed
* The little pop-up calendar if you click the taskbar is gone. "Is October 30 a Thursday" is the sort of question I ask a couple times a week for scheduling purposes; an immediate answer is now gone, replaced with nothing.
Yes, these are small problems, but the overall problem is that Windows 11 doesn't give me enough 'new and better' to make up for even tiniest of drawbacks. Even Vista, for all its warts, said "here's a shiny new UI that's interesting rather than just "we made it look more like MacOS because for some reason every design enthusiast on earth can only sniff Apple's farts" and "64-bit support that's actually going to work on most mainstream gear."
If they can't provide enough pros to outweigh "I miss a tiny calendar in the corner of the screen", what chance do they have to respond to the well-documented bigger annoyances like "let's break common taskbar configuration options", "cramming MS accounts even harder down people's throats" and "let's obsolete kit that would run it fine for poorly elucidated reasons."
You'd think they'd have put a lot more effort into trying to find some killer feature or app to actively sell Win11, that makes it worth dealing with the faults, like how back in the day, a new DirectX or IE version might have justified going beyond Windows XP. I guess they're just in maintenance-rundown mode-- not really caring if people embrace Win11 because they know that eventually enterprises will be required to accept it for support/compliance reasons.
The calendar is still in the system tray somewhere, it's just pointlessly buried behind layers of interface that tell you unrelated things like bluetooth status, and not at all immediate. I've usually already consulted a paper one by the time it appears.
It looks like if I click the date then click the arrow next to the date to pop open the calendar, it appears to stay open from now on when I next press the date, like the previous versions?
My work gave me a Win11 machine. It works well enough (for a 16Gb machine trying to juggle Docker and JetBrains software) but I find it frustrating in trivial regressions:
* I didn't ask for rounded corners, and it tends to make software look weird if it doesn't expect to have the bottom right corner chopped off. Evidently there is no trivial way to disable this-- I looked and saw guides like "you basically have to disable hardware-accelerated graphics to force it into a compatibility mode" which seems rather using a chainsaw to cut butter. This just seems to be another stop on the "the user shouldn't be theming their machine at all" journey. (I set up a clean Win10 install this week and was surprised to see now it seemed to default to a randomized Bing wallpaper instead of the Windows logo) noticed
* The little pop-up calendar if you click the taskbar is gone. "Is October 30 a Thursday" is the sort of question I ask a couple times a week for scheduling purposes; an immediate answer is now gone, replaced with nothing.
Yes, these are small problems, but the overall problem is that Windows 11 doesn't give me enough 'new and better' to make up for even tiniest of drawbacks. Even Vista, for all its warts, said "here's a shiny new UI that's interesting rather than just "we made it look more like MacOS because for some reason every design enthusiast on earth can only sniff Apple's farts" and "64-bit support that's actually going to work on most mainstream gear."
If they can't provide enough pros to outweigh "I miss a tiny calendar in the corner of the screen", what chance do they have to respond to the well-documented bigger annoyances like "let's break common taskbar configuration options", "cramming MS accounts even harder down people's throats" and "let's obsolete kit that would run it fine for poorly elucidated reasons."
You'd think they'd have put a lot more effort into trying to find some killer feature or app to actively sell Win11, that makes it worth dealing with the faults, like how back in the day, a new DirectX or IE version might have justified going beyond Windows XP. I guess they're just in maintenance-rundown mode-- not really caring if people embrace Win11 because they know that eventually enterprises will be required to accept it for support/compliance reasons.